Google and Global Warming

Two Google engineers, Ross Koningstein and David Fork, worked on an ambitious renewable energy project at Google. The idea was to solve the petroleum/global warming problem but, at the end of the project, they felt the plan had failed.

They write about their results in IEEE Spectrum. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change
They now say that existing technologies like wind and solar are too costly to stave off climate change.

"....we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope,” the engineers said. “Our society needs to fund scientists and engineers to propose and test new ideas, fail quickly, and share what they learn.”   

As a review by The Register of the IEEE article states: “Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”
 
Koningstein and Fork further state that, while the cost of replacing fossil fuel is overwhelming, there is another crushing concept in their research. Carbon stays in the atmosphere for one hundred years. James Hanson, former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote a paper in 2008 saying that exceeding 350 parts per million CO₂ in the atmosphere would likely have catastrophic effects. We’ve already past that limit. Right now, concentrations of CO2 is around 400 ppm. If Hanson is right, we will be stuck with current CO2 levels for one hundred years. While stopping CO2 production is worthwhile, some option to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is more important.